My interview with Thomas J. Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics, went up today at Engadget, the cool tech toys weblog.
At top there is an image of the White Box Robotics 912 series, which I photographed when it was shimmying around the floor at the RoboNexus trade show last month.
Burick talks about the state of the young robotics industry, how robots are coming down in price to the consumer level, how they may battle PCs for supremacy in the home, and why he didn’t care for “I, Robot.” Excerpt:
Burick: The bare-bones platform is gonna come in right around $799. For that you get the differential drive system, you get the IO card that controls the motors and the sensors, you get the full chassis and the body panels. From there, you add the motherboard of your choice. You can add a laptop hard drive, a CD-ROM drive and CD burner, and cheap Webcams, and you have a fully functioning robot. We chose to do it that way because the PC and robotics enthusiasts really expressed the idea that maybe I don’t want a 20-gig drive, maybe I want a 120-gig drive, or half a gig of RAM instead of 128.
The DIY platform as an initial platform made a lot of sense because we can get it in the hands of enthusiasts and they can get it out however they want. It’s important to note that we designed the platform to let people cut, drill, paint — it’s a far larger blank canvas than a PC, especially for the mod crowd. It’s DIY, do-it-yourself. At all costs, I want to avoid the word “kit,” because it sounds like a toy or model and these are very serious, real robots.
Here’s my photo gallery of last month’s robot trade show in San Jose — the nation’s biggest.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply